by Suzanne Weyn
“Who are they?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know who the younger gentleman might be, but the older one is none other than Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle.”
“What?” I cried. Surely I’d heard her wrong!
“Indeed,” Agatha confirmed. “He’s the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Do you read him in America?”
I would have answered her if I could have found my voice. At the very moment, I had the newest Holmes story, “The Speckled Band,” tucked away in my carpetbag. Now it was my turn to tremble in awestruck amazement.
“It’s practically all Jane reads,” Blythe informed her. “I didn’t know he was a doctor.”
“Oh, yes, darling. He’s also a physician.”
I watched while Conan Doyle and his friend bade good-bye to Shaw and continued on. My heart began to pound as I realized they were entering W. T. Stead’s house.
Why would this man of science, this paragon of rational deductive logic, be entering a convention of renowned spiritualists?
There could be only one answer: He had come to debunk these mediums as frauds. Using his brilliant powers of observation, he would expose the tricks they used to work their wonders.
This was my chance to learn the truth from a man whose word I could never doubt. It was as though Sherlock Holmes himself had come to deliver the final answer to my questions.
When we entered the main front room of the building, I didn’t see Conan Doyle or his companion. But W. T. Stead appeared from one of the side rooms and instantly approached Mother. “William,” Mother greeted him warmly by his first name; I had never heard her use it before.
He had a broad, open face with dark brows and piercing eyes. He was a man of middle years, probably in his fifties, and wore a full, white beard. “Maude, at last we meet,” he said, taking Mother’s hands in his. “You are just as you described in your letter, only more lovely by far. And these, of course, are your daughters. I can guess their names from your descriptions.”
He greeted my sisters each correctly by name. “And you must be Jane, the aspiring journalist,” he surmised when he got to me.
“Yes, sir. It’s an honor to meet you. Thank you so much for the tickets,” I replied. “If you can spare the time, I have so many questions I would love to ask you.”
“It would be my pleasure,” he said.
He led us to a ballroom where all the invited guests were assembled. There were approximately a hundred or so men and women. I caught sight of Conan Doyle sitting in the far corner with his dark-haired companion.
After a few moments, W. T. Stead appeared in the front of the crowd and announced that rooms had been set up throughout the house for the conducting of séances. Additionally, there would be sessions of tarot, Ouija board, and automatic writing. Throughout the rest of Stead’s address to the crowd, I couldn’t take my eyes off Conan Doyle.
I imagined a scheme for meeting him in which I dropped my copy of the Strand and pretended I didn’t know who he was but praised “The Speckled Band” extravagantly, causing him to like me so much that he made me his assistant. In another flight of imagination, I fantasized being invited to join him in solving a crime that took place there at the psychic convention. “The Adventure of the Meddling Mediums” is what it would be called, and I’d be featured as the American Girl.
After Stead’s speech, a paper was posted announcing the morning’s events, with different mediums and psychics being assigned to various rooms. Mother was to join a circle of mediums in the attempt to contact Queen Victoria herself, in the hope of getting her to comment on the present situation and perhaps give a word of sage advice for her quarreling descendants.
I noticed Mother engaged in conversation with a balding, pleasant-looking man in his early fifties. “This is Mr. Robertson,” she introduced when I approached. “This is my daughter Jane. She would also like to be a writer like yourself.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I greeted him. “You’re not a medium or psychic, then?”
“No. My experience is as a merchant marine and later a writer of sea stories,” he said. His speech immediately revealed him as American. “Have you read any of them?”
“No, I don’t think so.” I couldn’t recall ever reading a sea story. “But your name is very familiar to me,” I said truthfully. I struggled to recollect where I’d heard of him.
“Perhaps you’ve read Sinful Peck?” he suggested.
“I should think not,” Mother demurred. “Not with a title like that.”
“It’s not as scandalous as you might think,” Mr. Robertson said with a laugh. “It’s a sea story like my others.”
“What brings you to this conference?” Mother asked him.
“Well, madam, it’s a funny thing. Although I have a great deal of personal experience of the sea, and my father was also a captain on the Great Lakes, I always have the sensation that my stories are coming to me in visions of the future.”
“You’re psychic,” Mother said.
“I don’t usually admit this freely, but I believe I am,” he said. “I confided this to my fellow writer Mr. Stead, and he invited me to come to the conference to explore the possibility further.”
“Best of luck to you, Mr. Robertson,” Mother said, departing to meet the other mediums in her Queen Victoria séance in a library on the second floor.
“Since you are both writers, I was wondering if you knew Dr. Conan Doyle,” I said.
“I met the man once, though I don’t really know him,” Mr. Robertson replied. “He’s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you know. He was knighted for his service as a doctor in South Africa during the Boer War, and for writing about it.”
“Do you know why he is here?”
“I do know he is with the British Society of Psychical Research. That is a most respected group that researches all occurrences of the supernatural.”
“Is he a believer?”
“He calls himself an agnostic, which means one who does not know.”
I suddenly had a name for what I was—an agnostic. It was reassuring to know that it could be named something other than confused, bewildered, unsure.
I spoke about writing a bit further with Mr. Robertson and about the difficulties of getting published. He agreed to make some time to discuss professional writing with me on the last day of the conference. Thanking him profusely, I hurried off to Mother’s séance.
When I reached the second-floor library, Amelie, Emma, and Blythe were already inside. Mother had talked her fellow mediums into allowing the twins to join them as they linked hands at a round table. Stead was one of the participants along with two other, very average-looking middle-aged men and an elderly woman. A large glass ball was in the center of the table.
Blythe and I were permitted to observe if we promised not to interfere with even the slightest sound. We sat on the straight-backed chairs lined up against the wall.
Just as the séance was about to begin, Conan Doyle slipped quietly into the room and took a seat right beside me. I was dying to say something to him but had promised my silence.
With the lights very dim, Stead began the session by summoning the queen to come and help her country one last time. Conan Doyle leaned close to me. “There’s no rest for the weary, I take it,” he quipped irreverently. “The old girl ruled for over fifty years and they still want her to work.”
Stead stopped talking and all the mediums looked at us in annoyance. “Sorry,” Conan Doyle apologized. “Proceed.”
Stead resumed his attempt to summon the queen’s spirit. After a few moments, one by one, the other mediums, including Mother, joined him. The elderly woman grew forceful, raising her voice and demanding that Queen Victoria appear in the same tone one might command a dog to sit. I didn’t imagine a queen who had once ruled half the world would respond well to that approach.
All this calling, conjuring, and commanding went on for the better part of fifteen minutes. Blythe sat forward and watched. Conan Doyle had slid low in h
is chair, his arms wrapped around his belly. “This could go on all day,” he complained to me under his breath.
“You don’t think she’ll show up?” I whispered.
“I hoped she would, so I could expose them in some fakery,” he confided.
“You’re not a believer?” I asked.
“Not for a second,” he answered in a low voice. “Stead asked Ehrich Weiss and myself to observe and alert him to signs of fraudulence. He must give Taft accurate information.”
Just to hear him speak was heaven. It was exactly like I imagined the voice of Dr. Watson in the Holmes stories. Forevermore I would hear that rich, resonant voice speaking when I read the text of a Sherlock Holmes adventure.
“If it’s a fraud, why is nothing happening?” I quietly inquired.
“My intuition is that these particular people are honest, but misguided. They’ve set out to do something impossible and thus derive no result.”
I looked over to Mother, whose eyes were shut and her brow furrowed with concentration as she quietly tried to summon the queen. Emma and Amelie had also closed their eyes and were gently rocking back and forth.
And then, abruptly, Emma lurched to her feet, breaking the chain of hand holders.
“Surging rivers of gushing blood!” she cried, throwing her arms open. Her eyes were now wide as though viewing the horror she spoke of.
Amelie’s face was also contorted into an expression of absolute terror as she sat ramrod straight in her chair.
“Do not do this thing, my children! Stop it now, I say! It is chaos! It is suicide and damnation!”
This was not Emma’s voice! Not even if Amelie was speaking through her.
Her right arm swung around like a compass finding true north, and she pointed to Conan Doyle. “You will suffer! Such unbearable pain! I weep for your intolerable loss.”
The color drained from his face as Emma locked him in a fierce, wild stare. “Brace yourself, man. Your son will go to fight in France and he will not return.”
This was too much!
I hoped fiercely that he did not have a son. I wanted to scold Emma, demand that she stop saying such awful things.
I stood to admonish her but I never got the chance.
“Heed this warning from a queen to a boy king!” Emma shouted.
Conan Doyle let out a strangled cry of surprised anguish.
At the exact same moment, Emma and Amelie both crumpled to the floor.
One of the mediums threw the light switch and everyone rushed to their aid, lifting them by the shoulders, patting their cheeks. “Give them room to breathe,” Mother commanded. “Step back.”
I noticed Conan Doyle, his palm pressed over his eyes and a trail of tears running down his face from either eye. Was it possible that this paragon of logic had been reduced to such a state by Emma’s prediction?
Apparently it was so.
Chapter 18
Emma and Amelie came to consciousness pretty quickly but seemed dazed. Cousin Agatha was telephoned to collect them along with Mother, Blythe, and me.
While we waited in the lobby of the town house, I saw no sign of Conan Doyle, though I did catch sight, from time to time, of the dark-haired man, Ehrich Weiss.
While Mother went off to tell W. T. Stead why she was leaving, I spied Weiss looking at some oil paintings hanging on the wall across the way. Leaving my seated sisters and summoning my courage, I approached him. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know if Dr. Conan Doyle is still here?”
“He is not,” Weiss responded, studying me with his intense, nearly black eyes. “Are you a friend of his?”
“No, only a great fan, like so many others,” I replied. “I was at the séance where the medium spoke to him and I saw how upset he was.”
“Yes, he was completely rattled. He rushed home, desperate to see his teenaged son, Kingsley.”
My hand flew to my mouth. A boy king? Was it a reference to Kingsley?
Weiss snapped his fingers in annoyance. “Just like that, he has shifted his position completely from that of arch skeptic to a total belief in spiritualism.”
“That one séance convinced him?” I asked. I tried to hide the fact that I was scrutinizing him. Why did he look so familiar?
“He recalled once attending a speech given by Queen Victoria. The medium, he claimed, spoke in her voice. Plus, she knew of his son. I reminded him that he is a figure of public note. It would be easy enough for a charlatan to learn that he has an adolescent son.”
“My sisters are not charlatans and they know absolutely nothing about Dr. Conan Doyle,” I assured him, probably sounding more than a touch defensive.
“Your sisters?”
“They were the ones who spoke to him.”
“And do you also have”—and here he rolled his eyes derisively—“the gift?”
“No, I do not.”
“But you’re a believer,” he assumed.
I hesitated, caught between loyalty to Mother, Amelie, and Emma, and my first response, which was to be truthful. “I am searching for the truth,” I said at last. “I am an agnostic,” I added, proudly trotting out my new word.
“Commendable,” he remarked. “Don’t be fooled, young lady. As a magician, I have traveled Europe, completely convincing audiences that I have conjured magic which I know to be no more than sleight of hand, clever machinery, and the ability to misdirect. I began learning such tricks as a boy, and do you know who my first teachers were?”
“Who?”
“Mystics and mediums. I trained as an assistant. They let me in on all their secrets. Did you ever hear of the Fox sisters?”
“One of the sisters trained my mother,” I said.
He chuckled. “The Fox sisters could make loud cracking pops with their toe and finger joints. They traveled the U.S.A. performing that little stunt, passing the sounds off as contact from another world, and got rich doing so. These women founded spiritualism, a mumbo-jumbo religion millions of gullible dupes now believe in, including, alas, as of yesterday, my poor, misguided friend Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle.”
“But they found the skeleton of the dead man who contacted the Fox sisters in the wall of their house,” I said, reminded of the firework celebration that had followed this event back when I was a child.
This caused Ehrich Weiss to laugh uproariously. “My dear girl, I merely said the Foxes were dishonest; I never implied they were stupid. They could well have heard tales of a man dying or disappearing in that house; maybe it was a story that someone murdered him and hid him in the wall. Many fake mediums are extremely clever—they have a sharp eye for the tell.”
“The tell?” I questioned.
“It’s a physical tic like a mouth quirk, a jerk of the elbow, a quiver of the eyebrow—something a person does that indicates an emotional reaction. Usually the person who does it is not even aware of it. But the medium is aware, and it directs the medium to keep pursuing that line of inquiry until a nerve is struck.”
I thought of Mother seeing Aunty Lily’s dead husband back so many years ago. Had she simply read the envelope addressed to Aunty Lily or had Aunty Lily given hints, shown a tell, that she missed Hiram? Maybe both things had happened.
“Conan Doyle must have displayed some tell when there was talk of war,” Weiss went on. “The medium picked up on it and targeted him, assuming that he was too old to be a soldier but probably had a son he was worried about.”
Was Emma really that cunning? I had never seen any sign that she was ever anything other than sweet and sincere.
“Jane,” Blythe called to me, “Agatha has arrived.”
I said good-bye to Ehrich Weiss and hurried to join Mother and my sisters. Together we piled into the motorcar and headed back to Brighton, all of us uncharacteristically silent, lost in our own musings. When we arrived at Agatha’s house, Emma and Amelie headed straight to bed. “That sort of genuine contact saps one’s energy completely,” Mother commented.
“So if a person doesn’t c
ollapse, then he or she is a fake?” I asked cagily. I had seen Mother collapse only that one time when I was very small.
“Not at all,” she replied. “Mediums have varying degrees of stamina and strength. Emma and Amelie are young and inexperienced.”
Only after they had gone up did Mother tell Agatha everything that had happened.
“So the twins have inherited your gift,” Agatha surmised.
“There can be no doubt after today,” Mother replied.
“How can it be, though?” Agatha wondered fretfully. “In what way can a spirit travel back from the spirit realm to communicate with the living?”
“You know, Agatha, everything vibrates,” Mother said. I hadn’t heard her use her famous Tesla-inspired phrase in a while, and was mildly surprised.
“When a person passes over, that soul begins to vibrate at a different rate from those of us still on this earthly plane,” Mother continued. “A medium is like a wireless transmitter simply tuning in the correct frequency. The gift is no more than a talent for discerning the correct spirit frequency.”
“Fascinating,” Agatha murmured.
It made so much sense when Mother spoke. But Ehrich Weiss had almost convinced me he was right. Which was it? I was more confused than ever.
“Say, Maude,” Cousin Agatha said uneasily, “I would so love to speak to my late husband, Reginald. Do you think it might be possible to contact him?”
“We can certainly try,” Mother agreed.
That night, after supper, Mother, Cousin Agatha, Blythe, and I sat around the table in the parlor. Mother produced her glass ball and set it in the center.
Close as I had always been to séances, I had never before participated in one; neither had Blythe. We exchanged nervous glances.
With the room almost completely in darkness, Mother began calling on the spirit of Reginald to come to us.
A silvery beam glowed in the glass ball.
The shades had been drawn, but my eyes darted to a sliver of moonlight that had found its way through a crack between the window and the shade creating a line of light. Was the ball reflecting that?